Kettering's connections in space

Kettering, known for its high-level industry connections, now has connections as high up as the International Space Station through alumnus Adams Sanders and Robonaut 2.

On the “coolness scale” Kettering University alumnus Adam Sanders’ work on Robonaut 2 has to score pretty high. The 27-year old finished a Master’s degree in Manufacturing Operations in 2010 while working at NASA developing Robonaut 2, or R2, the torso-up humanoid robot and the first human-like robot to travel into space.

Sanders was on hand Feb. 24 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch as R2 left earth with the Space Shuttle Discovery on its final mission.

“The most rewarding part of this is we’re getting to work with technology that puts us at the leading edge of the field,” Sanders said in a phone interview with the Flint Journal from Houston, where he has been living while working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

The General Motors roboticist engineer joined the then-covert project between GM and NASA in 2007 as the youngest member of the core team that created what has been dubbed the most sophisticated and dexterously advanced humanoid robot in the world, according to Flint Journal reporter Beata Mostafavi.

Sanders was the lead architect for programming the language R2 recognizes in order to understand human commands.